Lam Research Preferred Parts Pilot Program

Lam Research Corporation engineers, manufactures, and maintains semiconductor processing equipment used in the creation of integrated circuits.

Overview

I led a pilot program to determine the benefits of implementing a preferred parts setup.

Challenges

• There were many mergers and acquisitions leading to multiple identical parts being bought from different suppliers at different costs.
• The total commercial off the shelf library of parts is a huge data set with purchases exceeding $100 Million per year.

Solutions

• I tied together the ERP costing information with the classification system I had just built to create a dataset I could evaluate with Qlik.
• Using this dataset I was able to determine how much we paid for each class of parts and work with Supply Chain to determine where we would be able to get the best bulk purchases.

Results

• I identified $5 to $10 million in potential savings per year with an initial roll out to only 5 different class types.